Sacred Waters, Contested Rights: A Qualitative Study of Customary Water Governance and Environmental Conflict in Eastern Indonesia

Abstract

This study explores the complex entanglements of water, ritual, and governance in a highland community in Flores, Eastern Indonesia. Centered on the contested diversion of a sacred spring for an urban water supply project, the research investigates how local cosmologies and customary institutions shape community responses to environmental conflict. Through ethnographic fieldwork involving in-depth interviews, oral histories, and participatory mapping, the study reveals that water in this context is not merely a physical resource, but a living ancestor (Wae Tena) embedded in social relations, ritual practice, and territorial identity. Community resistance to the state-sponsored project was not framed solely in political or economic terms, but as a moral defense of ancestral obligations and spiritual balance. Elders, ritual leaders, and youth mobilized customary law (adat) and ritual performances as tools of ecological governance, reclaiming authority over land and water in the face of legal marginalization. This study contributes to the literature on environmental justice by foregrounding indigenous epistemologies and governance systems. It calls for a recognition of plural legal frameworks in resource policy, and for development planning that is sensitive to the cosmopolitical realities of communities who understand nature as kin, not commodity.